Never heard of microdata? You’re not alone but knowing what it is and using microdata on your website will improve page rankings, click-through rates and user experience.

Microdata is an HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users.

Microdata is not intended for the user to see. It’s there to help search engines better understand the content on your page. Some examples of the hundred’s of elements are:

Product Price

Product Image

Product Name

Reviews

Availability, i.e. in stock.

Yelp uses microdata to tag star ratings, number of reviews and price range on their website. This lets Google understand what those elements are and allows them to display that data specifically in the search results. This data makes it easy for a searcher to understand quickly.

People don’t read websites (you’re the exception reading this), they scan them looking for what they want and where to click next. If you can provide information in an easy to read/scan format, more people will notice and take action.

Microdata elements for anything

No matter what you are selling or offering on your website, there’s a good chance there is a microdata element for it. The hundreds of elements are broken out into groups, such as:

People

Recipes

Products

Place

Organization

and even Thing

As searchers get better at searching and more precise in their search terms, providing more precise data to the search engines will only help those people find you more often.

Zen Cart and WordPress and most other platforms all allow microdata in one way or another. If you are not using it, at least some of your competitors are. As the saying goes, if your standing still, someone is passing you by.

Contact Us to find out how to get microdata installed on your website.

The Zen Cart team has released a new version of Zen Cart, version 1.5.5d. This new version includes all the bug fixes and patches since the first version in the 1.5.5 series was released in March of 2016. Many of the highlights are listed below, but this is not a complete list. Our recommendation is always to be on the current version so you can benefit from the improvements and avoid any issues these now fixed bugs might cause. For further details on why, see our post why to apply patches and updates.

Version d includes a few minor fixes to version c. Version c was primarily the fix to the security vulnerability with the embedded PHPMailer software but also included a few other items since they were completed and ready as well. Versions a and b included a number of fixes and patches. Depending on your current version, your could get some or all of these improvements.

Fix several upgrade-related problems caused by zero-dates in the customers table data/history

Revamp admin sanitization code to work better with various plugins such as Edit Orders, etc

Admin orders page had some incorrect CSS classes specified

Admin customers page had some incorrect HTML tags for span and bold markup

A new One Page Checkout for Zen Cart makes checkout faster. Website businesses are always looking to make things easier for our visitors. That is most true during the checkout process. Once a visitor has found something they want to purchase, the checkout should be as quick and painless as possible.

Reducing clutter and distractions, such as hiding the left and right columns during checkout help. Amazon, the king of e-commerce has done this for years. Fewer distractions for the shopper means they are focused only on completing the checkout steps, just as we want them to do.

One Page Checkout for Zen Cart helps improve conversion rates.

By combining the billing and shipping options into one page, there are fewer steps to checkout. Fewer steps = high conversion rates. All order option appear on one page (see below) making the process simpler and faster for shoppers.

Simpler and faster means higher conversion rates.

There is another plugin that offers combined checkout pages but I’ve never recommended it. It is bloated and overly complex for what it does. This One Page Checkout for Zen Cart is simple and light weight. It is also responsive, i.e. mobile friendly. This makes is a great option if you are still using the default Zen Cart checkout process of four pages.

For more information or to have us install this One Page Checkout for Zen Cart, contact us!

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E-Commerce Experts

Wheaton Website Services are specialists in e-commerce websites for small businesses. We build, fix and host e-commerce websites such as Zen Cart. You can rely on us to keep your website running flawlessly for your customers

We ensure your site is technically designed, built and maintained to always be ready for the sale.